Where are the Questioning Minds?

Re: # 195

I think you should keep your mouth shut. I know arjun very well. He is one of those people who think that cartoons are just cartoons and they do not cenvey messages of hate, bigotry, insult, or derogatory gestures. He along with other Hindu cohorts have been trying to tell us this thru the last 500 posts they have written. It shows their conviction to their principles; therefore I am pretty confident that they will not do any such thing as you are suggesting.

A very nice article, but here are some points to ponder on. First of all who ever said that you cannot question anything in islam. Of course you can. You can question it, but instead of going to Israr Ahmad or qouting sufis you should have the intelligence to read Quran. Are you going to tell me that they know more about Islam then you do? Well if you are telling me that then it is your fault to not read Quran. Don`t blame these religious zealots who have different interpretation of Islam. These maulanas are a dime a dozen and are for the weak of mind. You truly sound like an intelligent person so start reading Quran and find out for yourself what is written in there. Women have a lot of rights in our religion and just because our society is structured wrongly does not mean that we cannot correct the wrongs.

200/
From Guradian Pages = [....``Europe you`ll come crawling when Mujahideen come roaring``, ``Britain you will pay: 7/7 on its way``, ....A toddler on the march was dressed in a hat that said: ``I love al-Qaida.`` ...]

Muslim to european: ``Ab tera kya hog re Kaliya?``...

European to Muslim: ``Saab - humne aap ko immigration diya, welfare diya, citizenship diya.....``

Muslim to european: ``Ab tera blood de.... hum ko tera blood chahiye.... Ha ha ha ( evil laugh wala icon ).....``

Re: # 195

tahmed:

``the kind of stuff he writes every day on chowk equating islam with terrorism ``

arjun doesn`t need to harp on it. the world has eyes and ears. read this from guardian:

........For centuries, English law has been crammed full of legal powers to arrest people who threaten violence or murder in public, or who go around terrifying ordinary people. On Friday, dozens of prima facie examples of such offences were committed during protests against Danish cartoons which offended Muslims by depicting the prophet Muhammad. One man was dressed in the garb of a suicide bomber, arguably an overt attempt to terrify of the kind that has been illegal in this country since at least the Statute of Northampton in the time of King Edward III, in the 14th century. Others carried placards demanding ``Massacre those who insult Islam``, ``Butcher those who mock Islam``, ``Europe you`ll come crawling when Mujahideen come roaring``, ``Britain you will pay: 7/7 on its way``, several of which appear to breach the law dating from Victorian times that outlaws soliciting to murder. A toddler on the march was dressed in a hat that said: ``I love al-Qaida.`` Many adults on political marches over the years have been convicted of breaches of the peace for much less than that......


mohd with a bomb as a turban represented the intolerance of muslims. and how did muslims react to the satire? by burning embassies/flag, threatening to kill/behead/kidnap. some even died protesting. granted that the image of mohd is blasphemous but why doesn`t the ``moderate`` muslims start to debate the meassage behind the satire.

Re: # 198
tahmed32-arjun-mantolives-urstruly quadrangle: I believe this conversation is somewhat beyond the purview of this article. At any rate Azra has forgotten us all anyway.
I know Arjun is feisty and ready with tit-for-tat, but can we try to develop a boring platform to try to understand the India-Pakistan instead of hurling insults at each other and maligning our respective countries. ``our`` is intended.
Really, people of our nations are aching for a systematic and peaceful growth of understanding so that the organized prejudices - promoted through and by our radical religious institutions - can be neutralized. The destiny of South Asia is individual and will arise only through a working rapprochement between India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri lanka. Can we take a tiny step towards it?

arjun: you are right here. i cannot disagree when you say that muslims write the same garbage in english since that is a bitter fact (at least for me as a muslim). but that does not change anything of what i wrote.

but saying you are right here does not mean i consider you to be anything more than those who enjoy spreading hatred among people.

not that muslims need any help from indians - no one can truly demonize muslims other than muslims themselves - who cry wolf at every opportunity, and then when the real wolf arrives (as in indian occupation of kashmir, as in the form of milosovic in the balkans, or more subtle forms like tightening of immigration quotas, discrimination in the job market) no one takes it seriously. as i said, ``muslim`` are their own worst enemies. (i put this in quotes since these muslims violate the fundamentals of the Quran every time they cry wolf without reason, every time they give this arrogant talk of muslims being some kind of chosen people, every time they ascribe divinity to a human being).

#195 by tahmed32(PBUYSRR) on February 7, 2006 7:53am PT


arjun thakeray needed this translation so he could post this on some western websites to lend credibility to his demonization of muslims


right..because you need cartoons in urdu to ``demonize muslims``..

all the posters saying ``Behead those who insult Islam`` and ``fantastic 4 are on their way``, in ENGLISH and carried by muslims, don`t demonize Islam

#193 urstruly: great. arjun thakeray needed this translation so he could post this on some western websites to lend credibility to his demonization of muslims (by demonstrating ``inside knowledge`` of what is written in urdu). the kind of stuff he writes every day on chowk equating islam with terrorism and the constant attempts of indians (government and individuals on chowk alike) to put their own aggressive anti-pakistan agenda onto the western bandwagon.

``muslims`` like you are your own worst enemies.

Re: # 188
Was Jinnah an Ahmadi? May be there is a Hamdani-Jinnah connection?

Re: # 191

The big bad guy is marked as being devil and he is applauding the cartoonist saying ``I am proud of you my son``. The protestors are Pakistani journalists in Islamabad.

This an interseting post by somebody in another thread. It may set people like Be-Haraam No 1 thinking about their origins

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Six? The Nobel Prizewinner from Pakistan, Abdus Salam, is officially Ahamadiyya (not a real Muslim) and unofficially a non-believer; he does not count as a Muslim. That leaves five.

I can think only of the Arafat farce, and of the political equivalent of affirmative action by which Naguib Mahfouz, a kind of Cairene Theodore Dreiser, was handed a prize (well, what can you expect when among those who did not receive the Nobel for Literature were Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Andrey Bely, Franz Kafka, Karl Kraus, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrey Platonov, Georges Perec, Osip Mandelshtam, Aleksandr Blok, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, Philip Larkin, Vladislav Khodasevich, Dino Buzzati, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Umberto Saba, N. S. Chaudhury, Alfonso Reyes, and on and on, and continuing with the overlooked living. You know how it works -- there`s an unstated quota, defined by language and supposed national origin. If the quasi-Dutch (because Afrikaans though English-writing) J. S. Coetzee manages to get it, then that queers the pitch for other Dutch or Dutchish writers, such as the much better Cees Nooteboom.

Aside from the non-Muslim Abdus Salam, that leaves Arafat and Mahfouz, as two of the six, both of them politically motivated prizes (the one to encourage ``peace`` through Israeli capitulation, the other to throw a sop to the Arabic-language audience (Mahfouz, not particularly devout though still a believer in some of the anti-Israel line spewed out by the Egyptian press, was stabbed by a Muslim fanatic who objected to something he, Mahfouz, had written some 30 years before). Of course there are no scientists among these six (see above for Abdus Salam; there can`t be, there never will be a Believing Muslim who wins a Nobel in pure science -- bomb-making is quite another matter; war-making technology is where all Muslim ``science`` is directed). And no fairsies, as we say in second-grade, counting the chemist Elias Khoury, who is of Christian Lebanese descent (a refugee from Islam). The tribe of talented English Atiyahs, similarly, whatever awards they receive, also fall into the same category: Western, quasi-Christian man. I can`t figure out who those other three might be.

In any case, the point is made. And it is an important one.

Islam stunts the mental growth. It really does, whatever Tariq Ramadan and other up-to-the-New-York-minute mediagenic ``Islalmic philosophers`` may think. Yes the Western world is full of nonsense and triviality. No, Islam is not the solution, but something even worse, far far worse, than the swamp in which we swim.

Be kind to your children: keep them away from Islam; warn them of its real nature. You talk to them about smoking, about drugs. Explain what Islam is all about, lest more John Walker Lindhs and Adam Gadahns start ``reverting`` en masse.

And to those who do not have to ``revert`` because, , through no fault of their own, they were simply born into the belief-system known as Islam -- usually because centuries ago some ancestors were forced to convert, in order to escape either from death or intolerable conditions imposed on dhimmis by dominant Muslims, from Hinduism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, well -- at long last you are free (certainly in the dar al-Harb) to undo the damage. Free at last, thank lord almighty, free at last. If you wish. Take advantage. Shed those mind-forged manacles. Be true to your most distant ancestors, and not their oppressors, who forced them to become Muslims. Make up for those generations, in your own families, of people (and especially the women) who had their potential stunted because Islam provided a totalitarian system of Total Regulation of Everything. If not for yourself, then for the sake of your children, take your leave of Islam now. Not slyly, not secretly, but openly and noisily. Give them each a copy of Ibn Warraq`s Why I Am Not a Muslim for birthdays or as graduation presents. Do not insist that they convert to another belief-system, but at least free them from the shackles of Islam. Why, especially for those either living in the West, or having to deal, in their lives, with so many Infidels, shoudl your children nhave to endure trying to reconcile the real tenets of Islam, and its constraints on skeptical inquiry, and the hostility it teaches toward Infidels (yes, they can try to ignore those tenets, but in order to do so, they will have to engage in mental somersaults, in denial, in intellectual and moral behavior that will be extremely damaging to them, wrenching, exhausting, and depleting, if they are to have to keep defending the indefensible belief-system into which one has been born and is not permitted to slough off. What if your daughterewants to marry a non-Muslim, and nowadays few intelligent non-Muslims will be wiling to become Muslim? Would you deny them the possibility of happiness because of the insistence, in Islam, that women can only be married to Muslim men? Really? In your own heart, and leaving aside the inclination to defend one`s faith for all sorts of extraneous reasons, including a whisp of filial piety, a desire not to have one`s parents or grandparents somehow insulted, what do you think of Islam? You know what you think. Skip the phony interfaith dialogues. Stop pretending to yourself it is only a ``handful of extremists.`` Read Ibn Warraq`s Why I Am Not a Muslim yourself. Go to www.secularislam.org, and www.faithfreedom.org. Study those testimonies and those articles. Let yourself decide for yourself. You are in dar al-Harb, or perhaps you are in Iran, about to slough off the mullahs; you are free to think as you wish.

Ibn Warraq did it. Ali Sina did it. That beautiful Hirst Ali lady in Holland did it. In 2003, in Turkey, 35,000 people converted to Christianity from Islam -- some of them, it is reported, the descendants of Armenians and Greeks who had been forcibly converted within the last century.

You can do it too, though you may have been born into a long Islamic past. Stop defending the indefensible. Stop being illogical. Stop pretending, for example, that Aisha was not nine years old, or that Muhammad did not have sexual intercourse with her, or that this story is not important today to Muslims (why else would Khomeini have lowered the marriageable age to nine?). Stop pretending that Qur`an and hadith are not full of aggressive, murderous admonitions against the Infidels. You know it is -- or if you don`t know, why don`t you find out about what Islam is really about, instead of parroting treacly nonsense?

Think not so much of the line of ancestors who were Muslim, but that even longer line of ancestors who preceded them and who were not Muslim -- who were Zoroastrian, or Christian, or Hindu, or Jewish, who at some point were forced, by the terrible conditions which obtained for all non-Muslims under Muslim rule, to convert not out of deep conviction, but simply in order to rescue themselves and their posterity from the effects of dhimmitude -- don`t they deserve to be heeded?

Think of that line of descent, those ancestors, and their lives long before Islam arrived on the scene, sword and shari`a and humiliating jizyah in hand, to see justice done. Join the modern world. It has its faults, god knows, but try it out. Don`t just wear modern dress, or talk pleasingly in English or French only in order to the better mislead the unwary Infidels. Really, try to live and to think as you would wish to, and to associate with Infidels not as people to be fooled, but as people to whom the real truth, the awful truth (not the Cary Grant-Irene Dunne movie, mind you) must be told. Try to live and try to think, to conduct research, to read or write books, without Islam holding you back, tying you down, making you say things you reallly don`t believe, limiting your social life to the most banal and hollow pleasantries, and the fixed smile, and the phoniness, and the refusal to confront reality, in your every encounter with Infidels, including those you really find quite pleasant ahd charming (and you must admit some of us have our charms now, don`t we?) Try on free thought. See if it fits.

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#190 by Urstruly on February 7, 2006 5:56

what does it say?

Re: # 173

manto:

``Jinnah was opposed to his daughter`s wedding for whatever reason (mostly political because already the Congress Allies - the Majlis-e-Ahrar and JUH- were declaring him ``Kafir-e-Azam`` for having married a ``Kafira`` ) ``

wasn`t jinnahs wife converted to islam?

if yes then how come she could remained a kafira???

jinnah would been just fine if wadia would have converted to islam.

Re: # 176

``Gandhi didn’t like his son’s conversion to Islam, but what do you mean by “reacted violently”. Did he engineer riots? Did he pick up a gun and shoot his son?``

Every year we, on chowk, go through this ritual of gandhi-jinnah tug of war orchestrated by manto and family.

anyway, last year i had posted gandhis letter on his views on harilals conversion. manto ignored it. harilal was a drunkard bump who converted not for the love of islam but to shame his father. he was disowned not only by gandhi but his own wife and children long time back.